The French Lieutenant's Woman acknowledges a wide array of responses to love and relationships.  Some view love as an intruder capturing them in a relationship, while others view love as a conventional alliance, and other view an attaching relationship as an experience limited to an instance.

            The most obvious reaction to love is that of Charles, a man torn between his love for Ernestina and his desire to be free.  While Charles is walking in the woods, he notices that "a fox crossed his path and strangely for a moment stared, as if Charles was the intruder; and then a little later, with an uncanny similarity, with the same divine assumption of possession, a roe deer looked up from its browsing; and stared in its small majesty before quietly turning tail and slipping away into the thickets" (239).  This observation mirrors Charles' view about love.  He sees love and a relationship as an intrusion into his life that contains a "divine assumption of possession", a desire to be free and autonomous.  At the end of the reading, Charles realizes that "he was one of life's victims, one more ammonite caught in the vast movements of history, stranded now for eternity, a potential turned to a fossil" (333).  When Charles tries to recall his engagement vows, vows founded in love, he feels as if he is "a prisoner waking from a dream that he was free and trying to stand, only to be jerked down by his chains back into the black reality of his cell" (306).

            For Charles, Sarah is a release from this intruding force in his life.  With her, he is free.  He recognizes her as a lance with the ability of "seeing him whole" (258).  She "was merely the symbol around which he had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys" (333).  Does Charles love Ernestina?  Does Sarah free him and see him because he doesn't love her?  Is it a relationship or just love that makes Charles feel confined?

            For others, love and relationships are based on convention and alliance.  For example, Ernestina's father recognizes that "when [Charles] asked [his] permission to solicit [Ernestina's] hand, not the least of [Charles'] recommendation in [his] eyes was [his] assurance that the alliance would be of mutual respect and mutual worth" (283).  Characters, like Ernestina's father, judge relationships and love based on rational factors of worth and alliance.  Similarly, Charles recognizes that many relationships are founded solely in a Victorian convention where "even between husband and wife the intimacy was largely governed by the iron laws of convention" (311).  Charles is able to break out of that convention with a woman he barely knows.  Does love create the convention or is it just in relationships in general?  Why is it different for Charles with some women than with others?